Gary Waterston, Formerly of Gagosian, Joins Pace in Newly Created Global Sales Position

Pace Gallery has hired Gary Waterston, a former director at Gagosian, as executive vice president of global sales and operations. According to a senior spokesperson at the gallery, this newly created position “is among the most senior level of the leadership team, working closely with Samanthe Rubell and Marc Glimcher,” who are the gallery’s president and CEO, respectively.

Waterston, who also works as a private adviser, will be based in London and will officially join the Pace on February 1. 

For nearly two decades Waterston worked at Gagosian, first as a director in London, where he oversaw the gallery’s expansion to its Britannia Street and Grosvenor Hill locations, and then as managing director for Europe beginning in 2011. He left the mega-gallery in 2020 for a position at Atlantic Contemporary LLC, an art world financial services startup. At the time he was among a group of high-level gallery staff who looked to explore possibilities in the market outside the traditional gallery system once the pandemic’s lockdown had ground the art fair calendar to a stop.

“Having stepped away from galleries, artists, and exhibition making these past three years, I am beyond excited and thrilled to be joining Pace Gallery in such a transformative role,” Waterston said in a statement, which noted that in the past he had organized exhibitions for three of the most blue-chip names on the gallery’s roster: Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and James Turrell.

Waterston marks the first major senior-level hire since the gallery reorganized its upper ranks in late 2022. Additionally, last summer Pace brought on Sarah Levine, formerly the global director of marketing and communications at Lehmann Maupin, in a new role as senior director of communications.

According to a classifieds listing on the New York Foundation for the Arts website, the gallery is also hunting for a curatorial director who who can “develop and execute a successful institutional strategy for Pace artists, with a particular focus on museums in Europe, Latin America, and/or Asia.” (The gallery currently employs two people in curatorial roles, but has not filled a role left vacant since March 2022, when Andria Hickey left the gallery to become chief curator of the Shed in New York.)

In an email to ARTnews, Rubell said, “We aren’t done yet! Employing fabulous art world people to better serve our artists’ goals and what they deserve is vastly important and our staff are a huge part of that!”